The west end of Fisherman's Wharf, where the old ships are tied up across from the red-brick warehouses, is the place to start a day and night of spending.

HYDE STREET PIER

The Hyde Street Pier is the opposite of Pier 39, in direction, style and authenticity. The farther east one goes, the more Fisherman's Wharf becomes a tourist gouge. So anyone with shallow patience or pockets should begin with the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.

America's only floating national park represents the working San Francisco waterfront. On display are wooden boats built in the glorious seagoing years around the turn of the century. The pier, wide enough for cars, used to be a ferry terminus. The self-guided walking tours costs just $2 for adults and $1 for kids.

Six of the seven boats moored at the pier are national landmarks. The queen of the fleet, the square-rigged Balclutha, has just returned after eight months of being scraped and polished in a $1.5 million restoration. Launched in Scotland in 1886, the Balclutha made 17 trips around Cape Horn and survived to become a spectacle with "more original material than any museum ship in the world," says John Cunnane, supervisory ranger.

Alongside the Balclutha is the C.A. Thayer, a lumber schooner built in 1895. Below deck is a video of its final voyage, as a cod fishing boat in 1950 -- the last commercial trip by any sailing vessel based on the West Coast.

Across the pier is the Eureka, once the world's largest passenger ferry, capable of hauling 2,300 peo ple and 120 cars. The Eureka plowed the bay from 1922 to 1941. On the great deck, it is easy to be swept up in the big-band era, particularly when the fog hides the Golden Gate Bridge, which put the Eureka out of business.

PIER 45

To continue "in the mood," walk east to Pier 45. Tied up there are the Liberty Ship S.S. Jeremiah O'Brien and the Pampanito, a Navy submarine that sank six Japanese ships dur ing World War II and still looks as if it could do some damage.

It costs $7 to board the Pampanito and $5 for the Jeremiah O'Brien.

The Pampanito draws a crowd in the summer. Everything on board is restored to its wartime condition. There is a no-nonsense audio tour, and one has to duck through low doorways and squeeze into cramped compartments. It can be claustrophobic, but anyone with the urge to complain should remember that the Pampanito once carried 80 men at sea for 75 days at a time.

Through August the Jeremiah O'Brien is behind the Pampanito, the two vessels' guns pointed at each other. As the old submariners' saying goes, "There are only two kinds of ships: submarines and targets."

Liberty Ships were targets, and the Jeremiah O'Brien is the last one operating out of 2,000 built. It made 11 round-trips for the invasion of Normandy in June 1944 and a longer one from San Francisco to France for the 50th anniversary celebration of D-Day in 1994. A National Historic Landmark, the O'Brien has an engine room so vast and impressive that scenes from "Titanic" were filmed there.

Across from Pier 45 are Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum and the Wax Museum. Both cost more than the submarine tour.

Of the two, the Wax Museum is more unusual. Open since 1963, it has 175 figures, from entertainers to royals, athletes to soldiers and statesmen. Downstairs is the Chamber of Horrors, with gruesome scenes like a man on a meat hook.

The Wax Museum and the adjacent Haunted Gold Mine -- a charmingly unsophisticated attraction, also from the 1960s, that harks back to Playland-at-the-Beach -- will be torn down after Labor Day, then rebuilt.

For clean corporate amusement, there is Ripley's Believe It or Not, which has two floors, 11 galleries and all manner of true stories, including photographic evidence of men who have survived being impaled. To exit requires walking through a kaleidoscope tunnel and rolling barrel.

PIER 39

Maintaining the funhouse feel, the Namco Cyber Station Arcade at Pier 39 has that familiar pounding cacophony. All kinds of machines present situations requiring gunfire. Others simulate horse, car and ski races. There is also a small bumper- car rink for kids who want to bang into each other.

To pilot a more high-tech vehicle, try the Turbo Ride, a hydraulic herky-jerk at the north end of Pier 39 that puts players in sync with action on the screen. For more thrills there is Frequent Flyers, a bungee-trampoline that springs jumpers 20 feet high for two minutes. After that, the nearby two-level Venetian Carousel will seem quaint and inviting.

While the kids are running loose in the arcade, parents can sneak upstairs to the quiet comfort of the Cinemax Theatre for "The Great San Francisco Adventure" and "The Living Sea."

"The Great San Francisco Adventure" is a 30-minute film with a silly plot about a time-traveler. But the accompanying footage makes up for it. First the camera is swimming with the sea lions, then it's sitting atop a tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, then whipping through the downtown canyons. The screen is wide, and all 275 seats are close -- maybe too close when the camera takes a stomach-churning ride down Lombard Street on the bumper of a car.

"The Living Sea," also 30 minutes, is a documentary about oceanography. At night, Cinemax screens "The Rock," which was shot in and around the bay. In the fall, the theater will begin running classic movies filmed in San Francisco.

The Cinemax Theatre opens onto the entryway to Underwater World, an aquarium attraction that drops viewers into the bay and onto a walkway surrounded by two tanks. The first is "Under the Bay," containing mostly bored-looking octopuses and jellyfish. The second, "The Deep," is livelier, with some healthy salmon somehow avoiding the sharks that share their space.

As individual attractions, neither Underwater World ($12.95) nor the Cinemax Theatre ($7.50-$10) is worth the money. But as a $15.95 package, they are as good a value as any on Pier 39, and an excellent place to escape the midday sun.

AFTERNOON DELIGHTS

Afternoon fog at the wharf enhances the misty romance of salty fishermen coming in for a grog. To best catch that flavor, walk or catch a pedicab back to the Cannery, opposite the Hyde Street Pier. Send the kids upstairs to stuff a teddy bear, fire ceramics or have their auras photographed. Then settle into the new patio bar at Jacks. There are 110 beers on draft but only one correct choice, and that is Anchor Steam. The outdoor stage has been around so long that Robin Williams used to stand there and tell jokes. It is a good place to hear soothing jazz and watch the fog drift over the brick warehouse walls.

The interior of Jacks is a long, oak-paneled hall with a big fireplace, wing chairs and candle sconc es. Designed by the English master architect Inigo Jones and built in 1608 for Queen Elizabeth I's ambassador to France, the room was bought intact by William Randolph Hearst, who shipped it to New York. It was purchased and brought to San Francisco by the developer of the Cannery.

A livelier bar scene is at Fiddler's Green, an Irish pub in an inviting old A-frame house across Columbus Avenue from the Cannery. The barmen have brogues, and they seem to have secured an exemption from the anti-smoking law.

For cleaner air and more than enough room to breathe it, there is the Beach Street Bar in the Cannery. There is also the Steelhead Brewery, across Leavenworth in the Anchorage Shopping Center, but it feels stamped out of a mold.

Upstairs in the Cannery is the Quiet Storm, a jazz club made plenty quiet by its cover charge and its hidden third-floor location. A cooler choice for jazz is the new Loongbar in Ghirardelli Square.

For raucous blues, Lou's Pier 47 cranks it up in the afternoon and goes all night with live bands. On weekends the music never stops. At night there is a $5 or $10 cover, but the windows stay open and the music can be heard from the street.

Cobb's Comedy Club in the Cannery draws the biggest names in Bay Area stand-up and lines to support them. But the longest lines at Fisherman's Wharf, night in and night out, are for hot fudge sundaes at the Ghirardelli Chocolate Manufactory.